WINTER PHASE

In the gilded shade of Pound Mountain, near Wise, the live and laurel oak understory dilutes the daylight. In a clearing the smaller boys of green summer collide. Jackie Wright signals he's scored. Raises both arms. Maybe a few touchdowns isn't triumph over much, but to imagine these Appalachian children should be seen and not heard is to miss the bright hour.

Dear Suki: St. Moritz, December 31st, I empty the Malbec red from the glass, peeling where the cold hangs with ripe blackberry. Your army troop of laughter spins on the bulbous bodies of calliope, blurring me where light gives gradients over the wood floorboard. As suddenly, starlings drop from harbinger beyond your onyx head; aphrodisiac the size of sweet whorls ebb over my fingertips and your opiate eyes. You: a yearling. You: a pirouette where the language oscillates and time embroiders nova on the apogee of my impossible sphere. Me: a feathered detail in your tiny, vintage-smooth hands.

1. Pink is a whole chicken cut open. It's the thing left raw, bleeding out. We want to believe the animal lived well and died humanely. If we force ourselves to think about it, we hope for a quick killing: a neck wrung in a blink or stretched taut under a knife.    2. Staked on the front lawn, pink is worn as a coat, beak down, as if a fake bird could have a real appetite, grazing on our grass.    3. In the wild, flamingos are paint pellets shot inside out — pink because they eat pink creatures, pink because of the pink inside. Dead pink keeps flamingos alive.

then there the west was, wasting space with all its obvious                        places. its dust and deadly colored canyons contrast against the blind horizon and winds scratch the orange                        earth 'cross the highway where sands storm above the asphalt. a tall tale town name on a roadside sign made me mark                        that lot of desert dirt as dearer than the rest. another spot we stopped to see what the map key had left nameless.                        the thing was past the arizona border on a hilltop. the billboards kept the mileage, lapping our dashboard's                        lazy meter. for a dollar each, two dollars, we went back behind the gift shop. we saw it. what we saw,                        whatever it was: a poor man's mummy, or just some unfunny something saved to excite the guidebook. the last exit                        for kitsch to busy kids amid boring badlands. before we left, I bought a cottonwood kachina—icon of the hopi eschaton                        remembered from my mom's mother's odd collection I'd known too young to reckon magick. the doll—no toy—                        my blue paint face feather-haloed saint with toothpick spear and dyed leather gear whips stars out of skies.                        the little card the cashier supplies says so and why, claims the end is nigh. he packs it up in styrofoam.

After the third year, my mother stopped asking. The second year, she wondered Are you sure? as if I wasn't sure I didn't want to celebrate: all the hats and cake and fizzing pop coursing through my veins and those of kids who acted like my friends but lately hadn't been friendly at all. My body ballooning out, and they, like little pins, poking fun. Day to day to week—weak, I started to believe them, started laughing, too, my meaty fingers, my sweaty pits stinking like gasoline and piss not even deodorants could mask— one after another, sugar, lemon, pine, even patchouli, musk. Then powders, then creams to cure the rashes I'd contracted from mixing the brands as if my skin was tired of the farce, wanted out, like the caged lion at the zoo, solitary, roaring for its pack, no longer listening to its masters, refusing to do tricks; the bright mess of the zookeeper's arm against the cultivated grasses, the lion stripping the top skin off almost as if debriding a wound to reach the better flesh below. And it was a show each time I lifted my arms in my mirror, stripped off sweaty gauze and pads gone sour over hours, to reveal what healing had occurred—if any. The goal smooth white, but so often mounds of red, ridges like little Vesuvii spewing forth humiliation. And what was adolescence but that, and she didn't seem to know and so she was distraught the first year I said no, asked What's wrong? Is something the matter? I could feel, even then, the inklings of that change, that laudable bench mark, as if some horrible wool had just begun to come off my eyes.

I often see him on my way home    at night, fighting stray dogs for food near the garbage    spilled out at the street corner. His life must be as serious    as the night-hunt of a fruitarian scavenging in roadside garbage.    He must have trained himself through the toughest    of austerity measures. And perhaps, with the rains setting in    on the slippery tail of a busy summer coming up as sudden as an accident,    even the thought of a bug-infested bed is for him a luxury. As his fortune    wriggled out of his fingers long before like an eel, every good thing seems    to be a pain in the ass, and the smell of fried    coriander seeds a whirlwind of chili powder in the nostrils.    As for his tummy, it doesn't swell with food; it rather gets    bloated with ulcerous gas. Listen, what comes out of it    doesn't smell at all like eau de cologne killing odor-causing bacteria.    His body doesn't make any difference, either. Who knows    why his fate turned and taught him how to accept humiliations warmly    and make himself at home with them? For it's all written on the wrinkles    of his forehead. Perhaps he's confronted them many times, telling    "I don't need you. I have enough memories of you to live with."    But they stay on like iron filings in a magnetic field.    Every humiliation – as far as I can imagine –    is scarier than when you get trolled on the web or when you lose    a libel claim in court. At times, he's broodingly quiet    as when a convict knows there will be no reprieve. Yes, you can take    an educated guess on his life or how it all started off    like a seed from dogshit germinated on a pavement crack.

At dawn while elk were drinking at the pool the men pulled on soft buckskins, tested flints. They might walk a score of miles before sundown. My sisters would be sifting pans of grain while children round of belly stirred up dust. I would creep three times around the fire and sing a praise song of the amber meal. To confuse evil spirits, I'd circle back the other way. Ah, there was the forest, toadstools blanched, black cohosh and wolf berry to be gathered only there. But most days had a flat, dull weave-- giving birth, watching birth, pounding maize. I wasn't urged beyond the twisted thorn trees when skies flamed. Each day, I mean, was the chaff of the day before.

the road I was told led home is lined with broken trees clusters of crosses along the interstate they spark the dark houses for the third week rain fills the basement and TV is more of what I secretly want that bridge was an escape route from cities my people fled in flames beneath cross and crescent I got everything I prayed for and still I'm terrified the president can't save me I plunge forward not yet able to feel the dead I walk on

Meaning karma has failed      and I return no venomous      pregnancy narrative spitting      orange at the shattered      horizon Slept in my car to avoid intimacy with a man who once sobbed on my belly lifted my hair in the shower while I giggling washed from me his saccharine      pheromone Each minute touching      him new-citied felt a dutiful favor      to younger selves On TV      Illinois is devastated littered      with vagrant wood There are fires tonight in Paris The president claims to care about farmers In America’s forgotten earlobe I lack resolve and cigarettes I desire to be sentimental      violently Like moths      fucking themselves      against a light fixture      in a rainstorm If there’s a pool      table why not lay your body across it let townies with sticks enact whatever they deem justice The lamps so generous spilling blue I’m ashamed at my own      craving for myth Woke      in the parking lot parallel      to an old life and mist      pooling the crick in my neck      Friend tells me stories of people took fingernail scars on their faces under the weary guise of livelihood performed as compassion I ask him teach me how to destroy something and get      away with it We like to      believe we are sympathetic      villains we can sometimes stare      so hard we forget language      is a sandwich of graves So what I loved wrong hoof-trampled I folded like a collapsed star told no one broke words like plates with my ceramic fists A man called me by my body I tilted my jaw to the sky      and laughed out a field of crows

The grocery store was all out of fresh collard greens this morning. That’s what we get for shoppin’ all late. But what did we expect? It was the first of the month & the new year. We are always short on something, mostly patience & rent. The turkey’s neck severed, slow-cooked in a pot of bargain black-eyed peas. An offering, an omen for our good fortune. My mother fries chicken with her hair tied up, makeup still basting from the day before. Always beautiful even when not. Still waiting for her man to step over the threshold. I am lying each time I say I do not want to be loved. My mother’s home has always had too many mirrors.

The summer before college, a heatwave of 110 had cooked my hometown. The sun was so intense that even Mom, the darkest in the family, burned when she hung out by the pool too long. She made Kaleigh suffer indoors because of the poor air quality. The marble house we grew up in sunk into the earth of Dad’s vineyard like an ancient tombstone.

The slaughter slides into the knife           because it doesn't have anything else to lean on.                       The difference between sacrifice and soldier is one           gets to learn a new language— one has a language for slaughter and it sounds like sacrifice.           Your coat was too soft for us.           I learned to look into the wound:           how the window to holiness tears itself wider and we reach                       saying here, take            our hooves.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows calling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild-plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the Sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my Mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That Music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet by heaven I think my love as rare As any she beli’d with false compare.

I wear not the purple of earth-born kings, Nor the stately ermine of lordly things; But monarch and courtier, though great they be, Must fall from their glory and bend to me. My sceptre is gemless; yet who can say They will not come under its mighty sway? Ye may learn who I am,- there’s the passing chime, And the dial to herald me, Old King Time! Softly I creep, like a thief in the night, After cheeks all blooming and eyes all light; My steps are seen on the patriarch’s brow, In the deep-worn furrows and locks of snow. Who laughs at my power? the young and the gay; But they dream not how closely I track their way. Wait till their first bright sands have run, And they will not smile at what Time hath done. I eat through treasures with moth and rust; I lay the gorgeous palace in dust; I make the shell-proof tower my own, And break the battlement, stone from stone. Work on at your cities and temples, proud man, Build high as ye may, and strong as ye can; But the marble shall crumble, the pillar shall fall, And Time, Old Time, will be king after all.